Sarah Mower: The Country Jacket Makes a Comeback in England

A British cultural question: What garment is equally popular with landed gentry, farmers, royals, taxi drivers, octogenarian grandpas, and now every East End indie girl, boy, and sixth-former on the streets of Kensington and Chelsea? The huntin’/shootin’/fishin’ classic (a waxed Barbour, or any oilskin-cotton or nylon-quilted equivalent) has been embedded in Britain for generations, obviously, but until the last few weeks, no young person—save for the clueless upper-class twit or eighties Sloane Ranger—would have been caught dead wearing a piece of clothing so closely identified with H.M. the Queen in corgi-walking mode. Forget that embarrassment now!

During autumn half-term last week, London girls and their boyfriends were congregating in the basement of Urban Outfitters in High Street Kensington to tussle over secondhand waxed jackets and specially commissioned Lavenham quilted jackets made by a British manufacturer of standard riding equipment. The very same group (teens to 30s) who wanted only army parkas in the winter of 2009, and were welded into their biker jackets the year before that, have concluded that this year, the country road is the only way.

Undoubtedly, some of this was stirred up by Alexa Chung and Coco Sumner (the twenty-year-old musician daughter of Sting and Trudie Styler), who were both slouching around last summer’s festivals in man-size Barbours slung over dresses and cutoff shorts. Weatherproof, warm but not too warm, and even cuter on a girl than a boy—what’s more genius than an old waxed jacket for managing both mud and paparazzi? Un-gilded Brit-girls like that are, of course, prime triggers of the style-ricochet effect: What starts as a tomboyish anti-fashion appropriation of a near-fuddy-duddy classic rebounds within months as actual fashion. The horse-mad designer Luella Bartley, who lives in the wilds of North Cornwall, is an expert in dissecting the nuances. “A man’s Barbour on a woman gives a kind of sexy narrative to an outfit,” she says. “The country practicality of a jacket like the Barbour gives a very English kind of nonchalant but sexy dishevelment, but should be worn with a pair of fairly tight jeans and a decaying T-shirt to show some feminine shape.”

Meanwhile, Anya Hindmarch has added excitement to the chase by having the foresight to approach Barbour for a collaboration. “I’m a total pavement girl, not a country one,” she says with a laugh. “But I think we all have fond memories of that smell of wet wax in the rain. There’s such an affection for everything that jacket stands for.” Hindmarch’s Barbour Foxy—rescaled to be narrower in body and sleeve, finished with a fox collar and cuffs, and including interior pockets for a lipstick and phone—was an instant hit. “It’s almost a problem,” Hindmarch says. “We’ve been inundated. In America, it sold out in minutes!”

Barbour itself, now in fourth-generation British-family private ownership in the North of England, is stirring too. The last time the company experienced an uplift in sales was when Helen Mirren appeared in The Queen, but now there’s a whole new crew in hot pursuit. Aiming for women who want a more feminine fit than the square-cut men’s traditional Beaufort or Bedale jacket (the choice of Chung and Sumner this summer), they have now come up with a new, tighter version, the Beadnell. (For those seeking originals in America, Club Monaco has been on the case this season, carrying Barbour classics.)

But what about the timing of all this? The last occurrence of stolid countrywear as a British style statement was around the time Princess Diana was a young royal bride in the eighties, but the way it’s being worn now reads very differently from the Harrods-fresh tribal clothing of Mrs. Thatcher’s Sloane Rangers. In 2010, it’s the emotional value of a durable old country jacket which works for a nation stoically digging in for a period of economic retrenchment. Under the Conservative–Liberal coalition government, which has just taken the ax to public spending and whose motto is “We’re all in this together,” the whole point now is this: It’s decayed and battered but it can withstand anything. (Barbour is keen to play up its substantial credentials too: The company has long had in place a re-waxing and refurbishing service, which gives each garment the potential to be passed down through generations.)

Whether it was purchased by a duchess at the Chatsworth Country Fair circa 1982 or by an inner-city teenager at Urban Outfitters only last weekend, no matter: Just so long as it has the appearance of a personally husbanded state of semi-decrepitude achieved through years of hacking through moors, being chucked in the back of the Land Rover with the dogs, or rolling around the fields of Glastonbury, everyone’s going to be happy.